


Hymnal

by BurningTea



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath is described, Castiel and Mary talk, Conversations, Destiel is background and pre-getting to the good stuff, I know, Mary Winchester - Freeform, Mostly me musing on Castiel's past, Occurs off screen, Past slaughter, Roots of doubt, Sections of this have been described as 'creepy as H' but not sure that's really a warning, The Past, s12, what a shocker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-07 00:36:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8776183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: When Castiel meets Mary on the way to the Bunker, they end up talking about the past, and about doubt, and about decisions. Castiel recalls a past Christmas, one where Anna was ordered to carry out God's will in a village no-one now remembers, and he finds he isn't so sure of when his first steps towards Falling were taken.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on White WInter Hymnal, the Pentatonix version. Yes, a Christmas song inspired this.

Castiel meets up with Mary in Lawrence. He doesn’t tell Dean or Sam where exactly he’s stopping off on the way back to the Bunker, but he does phone and let Dean know he’s on his way. He’s been working on that. 

Mary’s waiting at a table inside the coffee shop, a large mug of something topped with whipped cream in front of her. She looks a little sad, a little distant, and the red scarf round her neck doesn’t look as cheerful as it could do. Still, she brightens when she sees him.

“Castiel,” she says, and stands as he reaches her.

There’s a moment of confused fumbling and then Mary pulls him into a quick hug. Moving back, she ducks her head and tucks her hair behind her ear. It’s still shorter than when she first returned to Earth, and more styled than when he first saw her after they both left the Bunker.

“You look good,” he says, because it’s something he’s observed humans say to each other. Because Dean’s said it to him. Then, because he’s still himself. “You look sad.”

Mary offers a small smile and gestures for him to take a seat. As he settles, he sees Mary wave to the girl behind the counter.

“She’ll bring you the same as I’m having,” Mary says. “If that’s all right?”

Castiel wants to take the moment of doubt from her. Even if he hated hot chocolate, which he doesn’t, he’d say yes to it to wash the look from her face. She is very like Dean, is Mary Winchester, and Castiel finds it all too easy to admit her to the circle of people he cares about.

“It’s fine,” he says.

He takes off his coat and drapes it over the seat beside him, not needing the change in temperature but knowing better these days that it helps him to blend in.

“Do you own anything but suits?” Mary asks. A faint smile plays around the edges of her lips as she speaks and there’s some warmth to her eyes, sparking the gold that threads through her to Castiel’s true eyes.

Though it is said with warmth, Castiel frowns.

“I just have this one suit,” he tells her. “I don’t-”

“Sweat. Right. I remember,” Mary says. “Or sleep, right? Do you need to shower? Wait, don’t tell me the clothes just stay clean.”

“No. I can make them clean again, though,” Castiel tells her. “Is that…is that not all right?”

He knows he needed more than one change of clothes as Steve, but he did sweat then. And it was most unpleasant. He couldn’t afford many changes of clothes, of course, but that was beside the point. Now, he finds the suit works for most things, and people can sense there’s something a little off about him anyway. He’s been working on not caring. He misses not caring.

 

He thinks he does. As with so many things, it can be hard to remember what it was like before, or to decide if this is better or worse than it was.

“Well,” Mary says, “most people have more than one outfit. But it’s up to you.”

Castiel is interrupted in his reply by his drink arriving, and he thanks the girl. A woman, really, somewhere in her mid-thirties and looking in need of a rest. The service industry is much harder than many people seem to think, at least from Castiel’s limited experience with work. She flushes a deeper pink and leaves with an odd expression on her face.

“Did I upset her?” he asks, leaning slightly across the table.

“No,” Mary tells him, and she is certainly laughing now. “No, not at all. I think she might have taken a shine to you, though.”

It’s a phrase Castiel has heard, and he knows the meaning, but it doesn’t make sense to him.

“She doesn’t know me,” he says.

“You don’t have to know someone to be attracted to them,” Mary says. “And you don’t have to know them at all to find them good looking.”

In theory, he knows that. He can’t say he understands it, but he knows it. He had enough shows and books shoved into his head which made love seem instant, and interchangeable with lust. And the Cupids have always shot love into being in a moment. Even so, he isn’t sure what to do with the information. There are no Cupids here and this isn’t a story, and in real life he’s found it can take time to come to care for someone. In some cases, it can take a great many years indeed. In other cases, it just takes that long to say it. He’s found himself hoping lately that the time might be close. Either way, he has no interest in a woman he doesn’t know.

“Well, that’s very…nice of her,” he says, and takes a sip of his drink.

Mary does the same, and they fall into silence for a spell. Outside, a fresh flurry of snow shifts through the air and Castiel watches the flakes. They’re pretty. Beautiful. And so fragile.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Mary asks. “At least, until you think about being out in it.”

“Yes,” Castiel says, and despite himself he shivers, the memory of his time as a mortal welling up strong and painful. “Yes, it is.”

“It always seems more like Christmas when it snows,” Mary says.

“There wasn’t any snow, you know,” Castiel says. “Not at the birth. Of course, he wasn’t really born on the 25th, and not in winter, but I expect you know that.”

Mary doesn’t say yes or no to that, but she does fold her arms and take on the air of someone about to shift to a more serious topic of conversation. Through Castiel’s angelic eyes, she’s a shifting pattern of violet and green, of soft heathers and cornflower blues and myriad other colors. Castiel isn’t sure if it’s partly because Mary resided in Heaven for so long, but she is composed of more colors than is the case with most people. 

“I bet you’ve seen a lot of winters,” Mary says. “A lot of Christmases.”

“From a distance,” Castiel says. He blinks and turns his head back to Mary to find her watching him with that shadow of sadness on her face again. His human eyes pick up such things more clearly than he can manage with the angelic ones. “You have to understand, I was stationed on Earth to observe, not to interact. For most of the time since your Christmas started, I’ve not walked among you. And the last few years… Well. I’ve had other things to think about, mostly.”

The most miserable winter of his existence was the one spent in the storeroom of the Gas N Sip. He isn’t willing to discuss it, not with Dean’s mother. She might ask why Castiel was there, and Dean seemed upset enough about Mary leaving. Castiel won’t be the one to tell her about that sorry chapter of things.

“And before that,” he says, “there were other festivals. Other festivities. Christmas isn’t the universal experience many modern Americans seem to think it is.”

Mary nods.

“Yeah. I’ve been feeling like I’m meant to live and breathe Christmas for weeks, as well. I guess it was nice, in a way, to have it the old way. A feast and singing and no advertisements.”

“It was largely about keeping people’s hopes up and praying the sun would return,” Castiel says, absently, his attention caught again by the snow outside the window.

“Did you ever go to one of those festivals?” Mary asks.

Snow, and red and the crunch underfoot.

“Yes,” Castiel says. “Yes, I did.”

He shakes off the memory and makes himself look away from Mary. The colors of her snag at his other eyes, and he can’t bring himself to turn all of those away. A Seraph looks in all directions wherever possible, whether guarding or fighting or giving itself over to worship. It is a very long time since Castiel has been able to give himself over to worship, and he’s been working very hard on not thinking about Chuck. It’s just one more topic on a list of things he tries to ignore.

“If you don’t mind, it wasn’t the happiest of visits. The Host were rarely sent to bring glad tidings. And I was…different, then.”

“You were part of your Host?” Mary asks. She stumbles a little over the last word.

Not for the first time, Castiel thinks how strange this must all be to her. She’s human, and humans have enough difficulty accepting what they can grasp of his reality. On top of that, she’s out of her time. A few months in this century can’t have been enough to completely make up the difference. Not yet.

“I was,” he says. “And now I’m not.”

“Do you miss it?”

He regards her for a while, long enough to drink another quarter of his cup. The sweet richness of chocolate and sugar and cream are almost enough to overcome the spiky tang of each molecule. 

Before he was human, he thought that was how such things were meant to taste, when he troubled himself to try them at all. Now, he knows different. In this case, knowledge hasn’t made the experience any better. Not all change is good. Setting the mug down with a click, he leans in again, this time resting his elbows on the table.

“Mary,” he says, “why have you returned to Lawrence? It must be painful, the reminder of how much things have changed.”

“Is that how you felt the last time you were in Heaven?” she counters, though there’s no heat behind it. There’s curiosity, maybe. Perhaps a desire to understand. “Is that why you haven’t been back since Amara?”

Castiel sighs.

“No. Well, not entirely. Heaven was boarded up from the inside. I could get in, but it would be hard work to spend time with an entire species which has rejected me. You aren’t in the same situation. You have people who want you, now, in this time and in this realm. And your species is all around you. Returning to this town, with the memories you must have of it, seems like it would just invite comparison you don’t have to make.”

Mary shrugs and looks down, stirring her already melted cream into her chocolate. When she looks up, it’s with a wistful smile on her face.

“See that girl over there?” she asks, nodding to a different person from the one who brought Castiel his drink. “That’s Jenny. She wasn’t even alive when I lived in Lawrence, but she’s been here her whole life and plans on staying, on taking over this place when her Grandpa finally retires. Which will be soon. He opened the place the first year I lived here, back when I still knew nothing about the supernatural or what my family did. He saw me grow up. He was here earlier and he didn’t recognize me. I worked here for a few months, later, when I was a teenager, when I was trying to pretend I didn’t know about what my family did, and he didn’t even know it was me when he saw me sitting right here.”

“I imagine that must be strange,” Castiel offers. He isn’t sure what she wants him to say.

“It’s taking some getting used to,” Mary says. “But I had to come back here again. The first time was weird, no question, and seeing the house again… Yeah. But I needed to check another time. I had to show myself the life I remember just…doesn’t exist anymore. I’m hoping I can accept that, at some point.”

“Acceptance can be difficult,” Castiel says.

“But…you chose this, right?” Mary asks. “I’m not trying to say that makes it easy. But you chose to rebel, to side with us humans.” She pauses and watches him, eyes considering. “Can I ask what made you do that?”

“Dean can be very persuasive,” Castiel says, but he knows that’s not the entire truth. He was already doubting, already beginning to feel discomfort at what he was being asked to do. Ordered to do.

“You must have been ready to be persuaded, though,” Mary says, with that same knack Dean has of seeming to read Castiel’s mind. “When I…when I made my deal, it was with John dead in front of me. I don’t think I’d have said yes to that whole thing if I’d been asked when John was standing there alive. Makes me weak, maybe-”

“No,” Castiel says. “It makes you human.”

It also makes her a victim of the same manipulations that have plagued so much of Dean’s life, and Sam’s, but he doesn’t bring that up. Not just now. Mary is talking about choice, and discussing how she really didn’t have any feels less than useful. People don’t like to hear they have no choice over their own lives. 

“You’re saying angels don’t have moments of weakness like that? Of…of being closer to being swayed?”

Blood and bone and then crunch underfoot. And Anna, looking out at him from eyes sad and troubled.

Castiel frowns. The memory has never struck him that way before. Anna had her doubts, of course. That much was obvious from her choosing to Fall. But the incident at the winter festival was a very long time before she fell.

“I think,” he says, “perhaps we do. I think perhaps we have many, left without re-education, and perhaps some of us are better at hiding it than others.”

At this point, he knows angels are as riddled with doubts and with angers and with every emotion as any human is, but he used to believe they were without such things. He used to believe his own kind was perfect, which meant free of all emotions save love of God and of duty. Now, he knows that was just another sort of lie.

He sees Mary tilt her head, and forces a smile onto his face.

“You said you had presents for the boys,” he says, “and I brought one for you, too.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, they won’t fit well on the bike. They’re here.”

She pats the bag on the seat next to her, and Castiel sees parcels wrapped in bright paper.

“I’ll be there late Christmas Eve,” she says. “I think I want to stay here and visit with a few people first. People who’ll believe it’s me. There’s a psychic in town I’m hoping is still here.”

Castiel nods, and is glad the conversation has moved on. Still, in one part of his large and many-spaced mind, he reconsiders Anna’s expression that day in the snow. It’s an event he’s found swims up, every now and again when he sees snow, when it’s close to mid-winter. It’s only now that he realizes Anna was far from untouched by it. He wonders, for the first time, how he appeared to her.

***

She had taken a vessel with dark hair and a scar across one cheek. Castiel watched Anna from his vantage point, as ordered, as she carried out her orders. Snow fell around her, settling in her borrowed hair for a brief moment before melting.

No snow fell on Castiel. In his true-form, his energy returned any snow to water, then to steam, before it reached anything but the outer edges of what he was. An angel never left the world unchanged by its presence, and was never changed by the world. It didn’t matter: interacting with the outside world, with the material world, was irrelevant. It wasn’t his mission.

An angel wasn’t part of the human world. An angel was an instrument of God’s will, made manifest only when required, and Castiel felt the perfection of that understanding rippling through every wave of his being.

Anna moved her vessel, raising a hand and setting it on the head of the child who clutched the vessel’s leg.

As the snow fell around her, as it came nowhere near Castiel, Anna made their father’s will manifest and brought rightness to the world, and Castiel, Seraph and Warrior of God, saw it and was satisfied.

***

Mary hugs him again as he’s leaving, and Castiel promises her he’ll drive safely. He doesn’t tell her of the times before when he’s crashed, most especially the time he did so while human. It’s pleasant, to have someone caring about whether he’ll make it to the Bunker without an accident.

It’s late when he does get there, snow crunching under his tires as he pulls the truck to a stop, and he sees the light spilling into the night from where Dean’s waiting for him.

“You have a good trip?” Dean asks as he meets Castiel in the doorway, just before he pulls him into a hug.

It’s a day for being hugged, apparently, because Sam appears a moment later and hugs him, too.

“It was fine,” Castiel says. “I saw Mary. She gave me presents to bring up for you both.”

Sam’s face falls and Dean’s shuts down.

“She’s not coming?” Sam asks. “You didn’t say you were seeing her.”

Dean says nothing, but the hurt is written in every line of him, and Dean is a script Castiel has learned to read well.

“Yes,” Castiel says quickly. “Yes, she’s well. I only stopped to see her because I was driving through Lawrence and she was already there. I only stopped for a hot chocolate. She’s just going to be up late on Christmas Eve and she’s on a motorbike. She won’t have room for the presents.”

At that, Dean perks up, his smile almost believable. If he’s really upset that Castiel stopped instead of driving right by where Mary was, he at least is past the point where he feels the need to punish Castiel for it. Some change is good.

“That many presents, huh?” he asks. “Well don’t just stand there. Let’s get them inside!”

Castiel lets them talk as they help him carry down the parcels, telling him about hunts they’ve been on since he saw them last. He tells them about some of his, and thinks he sees pride in Dean’s eyes, affection in Sam’s. In so many ways, they still see him as oddly innocent, as though not having as much experience as they do in human ways of killing means he’s untainted.

At the time, he didn’t feel tainted by the slaughter in that village. He doesn’t think he did.

Dean doesn’t make him hot chocolate. Dean makes him something with enough alcohol in it that most humans would choke just on the fumes, but Castiel tosses it back and this time it’s definitely pride on Dean’s face.

“Let me top that off for you,” Dean says, and disappears to do just that.

While he’s out of the room, Sam looks to Castiel, glancing at him and away a couple of times and clasping his hands together over his knees. Castiel waits, trying not to look too expectant. Sam can seem more open than Dean, but the times he shares something real, something meaningful, are rare, and Castiel has learned not to spook him. Tactical skill can be applied to almost anything, with time. Old lessons can be re-purposed.

“Did Mom, er, did she seem okay?” Sam asks. “She finding her feet yet?”

“I don’t think she ever lost her feet,” Castiel says, mostly to see the look on Sam’s face. He’s long past missing as many references and metaphors as he used to, but Sam seems to find it comforting, sometimes, if Castiel pretends that isn’t the case. Dean, too, but in a different way he isn’t letting himself dwell on. “Your mother is still working out how to fit in this world, Sam.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “That can be tough.”

There’s a lull and Castiel listens to Dean in the distance, listens to him clattering about in the kitchen spending far longer making Castiel another drink than is really necessary. Dean has grown a little over the last few months, his mother’s return easing something in him and unsettling him in other ways, but he still finds affection easiest to express through actions.

Finally, Sam shifts, casting a slightly apologetic look at Castiel.

“I guess it’s been tough for you, too. Getting used to being on Earth all the time. In a vessel.”

“Yeah,” Castiel says, but he tilts his head and frowns. It’s hardly a new situation, not by the standards of a human life. To an angel, he’s slipped at an alarming rate, but the last several years have been a series of steps taking him from detached celestial being to a creature compacted inside a shell of flesh in this one dimension. He isn’t sure why Sam’s bringing this up now. “I’ve had a lot to learn.”

“Do you…” Sam pauses and runs a hand through his hair. “Do you think it’s gotten easier?”

Easier. Castiel supposes that depends on what Sam means. Is it easier, now, to be so full of feeling and so very aware of the reality of pain? It was easier, he thinks, to be that distant light that looked down on humanity and acted out the wishes of his superiors without letting his empathy sway him. It was easier to be the star above the stable than to be the humans inside it. That isn’t the same as saying he regrets the changes.

“In some ways,” he says, because this is Christmas and every film and TV show and book he’s had poured into his head has told him Christmas is a time for warmth and for family and for caring, and not a time to make your brother feel uncomfortable. “As I say, I’ve learned a lot.”

“Well that’s…I suppose that’s good, Cas,” Sam says.

Dean reappears with the drink and they say no more about it, but Castiel finds himself thinking again of that snowy clearing in the forest. Looking back, he wonders how easy that was for Anna, and how easy it really was for himself.

He’s taken many steps over the last few years, and it’s difficult to pinpoint the first one. Anna must have taken her own steps, and now Castiel looks back on it and thinks of the light in her vessel’s eyes as Anna surveyed her work that day.

Perhaps, to her, the blood on the snow had been more than a sign of a task completed in their father’s name. Perhaps it really had been a sign, telling her to doubt, to rebel. He wishes it had been for him, as well.

***

Snow crunched underfoot. If she didn’t look down, it was easier to pretend it was just snow. Easy to pretend the red at the edges of her vision was evening sunlight, or the last few leaves of autumn clinging on to skeletal branches.

She hadn’t meant to think the word ‘skeletal’.

Movement behind her brought her round, bringing herself to a careful stop in this borrowed body. Castiel waited several feet away, at a distance as he usually was. No matter how faithfully he followed Heaven’s orders, there was always something a little separate about her second-in-command, a little other.

“It’s done?” she asked. The words were weighty in her throat.

“Yes,” he said, and his form shifted, the colors merging and undulating as he adjusted to the space around him. “You sound…less than content.”

Less than content. A damning phrase indeed from Castiel, who for the past few hundred years had been the most perfect of angels. Of course, Anna remembered why he’d been sent for correction that last time. All memory of it had been wiped from the other angels’ minds, save for the fact it had happened at all. Knowing they could all be corrected, educated, but not always knowing why kept the rank and file alert. She was only allowed to know, as his superior, that he had disobeyed a direct order to smite a child, so that she could monitor the situation and ensure it didn’t happen again.

“Heaven’s will is done,” she said, as though that were any kind of an answer.

“It is,” he said. His limbs moved, the eyes studding them searching the area. “None survived. As ordered.”

“As ordered.” Her blank tone probably sounded like satisfaction to him. It probably didn’t sound like screaming.

“Michael will be pleased,” Castiel said. “Our father will be pleased.”

Anna nodded, though she was far from certain of that. She was less certain than she should be that she cared.

“No-one will know of them, or of their corruption,” Castiel continued.

“No,” Anna echoed. There had been no information on what form that corruption had taken.

She made herself look, then, using the senses she’d kept tamped down since the smiting. 

Every eye stung in a way that made no sense, and she looked out over a woodland laid to waste, over the charred remains of what once were houses, meetings places, temples. Temples of a kind.

It was to be their mid-winter festival. When she’d arrived in a shower of light, bearing all of Heaven’s wrath with her, it was to find children tumbling in the snow, excited at the prospect of the last of the stored fruits. She carried one now in her pocket. Her host stopped screaming sometime during the chaos. Anna wasn’t sure when. She was almost sure the apple she carried was meant for the small girl with her hair in plaits, the one who clung to her host’s skirt for a brief moment before the dying started.

Their gods lost a large settlement of followers today, just one of many being wiped out, and Anna wondered, as she thought back on that child, what could have earned such a punishment. 

When she left, she would be forced to take her host’s soul to Heaven with her. She imagined the woman would scream at that, too. But Michael’s orders were clear: the entire people were to be wiped out. It didn’t matter that the reasons were unclear to Anna. Unknown. 

Castiel might be satisfied, now, with simply knowing Heaven wanted it done, but Anna…

No. It didn’t matter. Anna had served faithfully for millennia. Anna was trusted. Anna obeyed… Anna saw no justification for wiping out an entire budding civilization and all its people with it. She had seen no sin in the few minutes before wonder gave way to terror, gave way to death. She’d seen only people gathering to call back the sun, and wasn’t all faith only that? A calling to something greater, something brighter, in the hopes it would return and keep you from the dark?

The gods of these people lived in the earth and in the streams, they lived in the trees and in the fruits. They lived in the apples, just like the one meant for the girl. With no-one left to believe in them, the gods would curl up small and wither, and there would be nothing but dead space in the fruit. She didn’t see how that was a victory, to bring absence where there had once been life.

But she was obedient, and she stood in God’s light, even if she never felt it from God himself. 

She was sure she wanted to feel God’s light. She was an angel. She must do.

“Do you have further orders?” Castiel asked.

He watched from nearby as she smote the people here, nothing on any of his faces showing distress. He was a beacon to her, a sign that although she dealt death and destruction, it was under the eyes of the Host, and that made it holy. That made it pure.

That meant she didn’t feel the stink of corruption in her own body, because what she did was right. It was righteous.

“No,” she said. “Our father’s work is done here.”

She stepped forward to lead Castiel form the clearing. Snow crunched underfoot, and she made herself not care about the bones.

***

Dean finds Castiel outside, staring up at the stars. Sam retired to bed hours ago, and Castiel thought Dean had done the same. For himself, bed is a pointless concept now he has his Grace back, and he has always liked looking at the stars. They seem far more distant than they used to do.

The sky is clear tonight, and almost glittering. There’s snow on the ground but none left in the sky.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean says, his breath frosting in front of him as he steps up almost shoulder to shoulder with Castiel. “How you doing?”

“I’m fine,” Castiel says, and dips his chin, reconsidering. “Perhaps not fine, but closer to it than I have been for a good while.”

If Dean’s surprised Castiel is being more open, he doesn’t say anything. It’s a new thing, in its way, this slow unfurling of their true states. It’s put down roots in the phone calls and occasional meet-ups over the last months, until Castiel sometimes finds himself calling just to talk.

Some changes, some steps, are absolutely for the better.

“You’re thinking about Mary again,” Castiel says, because it’s a good guess and because Dean has that particular set to his shoulders, has that particular tightness and wistful yearning to his eyes, that he tends to get when thinking about his mother. “She promised she’ll be here.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, I know. And, I should be excited, right? First Christmas with Mom since I was four. Fuck. That’s…that’s forever.”

Castiel doesn’t tell Dean it isn’t forever, because he’s come to understand that forever is subjective.

“Trying to feel something you don’t doesn’t work,” Castiel says, because he’s no stranger to trying that. When he was Steve, he tried it almost every day, and before that, when he still didn’t know what human felt like from the inside out, he fought to feel that vast, multi-faceted serenity that was his existence for so many thousands of years.

He thinks.

“Yeah,” Dean says. Sighs. “Yeah, you’re right, Cas.” He leans sideways and nudges Castiel with his shoulder, and Castiel lets himself be swayed. “How’d you get so wise, anyway?”

Castiel rolls his eyes and smiles.

“I’m an angel, Dean. That means knowledge, and wisdom is knowledge.”

“Different kind of knowledge, the way I see it,” Dean says.

“Yeah,” Castiel says, and doesn’t mention that Dean still has his shoulder pressed up against Castiel’s, the warmth of him seeping through the fabric between them. “Yeah, it is.”

Neither of them push the issue, but when Castiel is back indoors, sitting on his own in the library with Dean’s warmth only a memory to add to his store of so many memories, he finds himself wondering when he started to change knowledge for wisdom, and if he can really say he’s made that shift at all.

He wonders when it started, and thinks of snow, and red blood, and bones.

***

Mary arrives in a fresh flurry of snow and looks almost bashful when Dean insists she be the one to put the star on the top of the tree. Dean had been joking that Castiel should have the honor, but he’s happy to let Mary do it. Castiel doesn’t even remember the Winchesters having a tree before, but it’s pleasant. In its way.

He didn’t used to find it so difficult to keep his mind from wandering, or to push aside thoughts he hadn’t summoned, but he looks at the tree and he thinks of a clearing in a forest. It’s strange, the way one image, one moment, can spark a trail this way. A portion of wisdom must lie in knowing how to follow it. The rest may well lie in knowing when not to.

“You okay?” Mary asks, stopping next to him with just a few inches between them. “Dean said you’d been quiet. Anything on your mind?”

That’s something Castiel has noticed about Mary: she doesn’t brush off or bury things in quite the way Dean does. If she sees something needing a conversation, she has it, even if it might not happen right away. It’s a form of bravery Castiel admires a great deal, however alien it seems to him.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Really. I’ve just…been thinking. About the past.”

“The past?” Mary asks.

Castiel glances at her and sees the way the colors from the tree-lights blush her skin. It’s a little like the way he sees people, saw people, back when he wasn’t in a vessel. He still sees their colors now, but not with such clarity and not with such texture. It’s comforting and disquieting in equal measure.

“Back before I spent any real time with humans,” he says. “When I spent this time of year in my true form.”

“Back in that Christmas I asked you about?”

She’s certainly as perceptive as Dean, if often about different things, and she remembers. There’s something almost angelic about her, and Castiel knows that doesn’t mean what most think it would.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ve…been finding it close to the surface of my thoughts.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary says, “if I said something that’s troubled you.”

Castiel shakes his head and risks leaning into her, just a little, the way Dean does sometimes with him. It warms him when Mary presses back.

“Don’t apologize,” Castiel says. “I suppose I try not to look back. It can be…”

“Painful,” Mary says for him, and the bitter tone to her voice says she speaks for herself as well. She sighs. “But it can useful. Necessary, even. If it helps you put things in perspective, or work through them.”

“Has revisiting old places helped you with that?” Castiel asks.

Mary shrugs. He feels the movement through his own arm.

“Maybe. A bit,” she says. “I guess the trick is to know what to look back over and what to leave in the past. If that time keeps springing up in your mind, maybe you do need to work out why. Might be some part of your mind trying to tell you something.”

“Perhaps,” Castiel says, and frowns. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Wondering what?” Mary asks.

“Where it started,” Castiel tells her. “My Fall. If this is a Fall. I suppose most of Heaven thinks it is.”

“You don’t know when it began?” Mary asks, not trying to talk him out of thinking of himself as Fallen. She doesn’t sound as though she sees it’s a terrible thing, either.

“No.” Although he’s often thought it stems from saving Dean, or perhaps from that time Dean told him to take a stand for the world. The first time he did that. But maybe it was from earlier - maybe it was from seeing his superior Fall by choice, or before that, when he saw a look in her eyes that didn’t reflect the glory and joy of the Host. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Mary says. “A bit, at least. But it doesn’t matter as much as where you’re going.”

She sounds like she’s working her way to believing that, and Castiel nods and agrees and watches the lights on the tree. And he doesn’t tell Mary about Anna, even though he thinks the two would have liked each other, if they’d met free of Heaven’s interference and with their minds and destinies their own. He thinks they would have had determination and wisdom in common, and a refusal to let things lie.

He thinks it could have been very different, if Anna had been able to come to him and the two of them had Fallen together. Jumped together. 

“I used to think I was set on a path,” Mary says, into the silence that’s fallen between them. “I used to think, when I was a kid, that I was a Hunter and that was that. And then I met John, and I decided I wouldn’t be.” She shrugs, and the colors of her shift and waver. Some of them are the tree-lights and some of them are her. In the semi-darkness, they merge. “Of course, I thought it was my choice, then. Suppose I was fooling myself that I ever really had a choice, that I could be a wife and mother and...and normal. That I could stop being what my family wanted and be what I wanted instead.”

“But you still hunted,” Castiel says. He speaks softly. It feels like the kind of thing that has to be said softly, in case it scatters the moment. “And you hunt now.”

“And you haven’t stopped being an angel,” Mary says. “But you aren’t being an angel in quite the same way.”

“And meeting John is what changed things for you?” Castiel asks.

She starts to nod, something Castiel sees with the eyes along his right upper wing as well as feeling it against his human arm, and stops before the motion is completed.

“No,” she says, but the word is drawn out, slow, like she’s testing it as she says it. “No, not exactly. I mean, yes. I decided I wanted to make a home with John, and it’s not like being a housewife was the only option, even then, but it was still expected by most people I knew that I’d cook and clean and… Well. Even my Mom did all that, and she hunted, too. But I suppose it started a little earlier.”

Castiel leaves the silence to ask the question this time. Just like her sons, Mary can need to work her own way to personal revelations.

“It was a Christmas, actually,” she says, sounding almost surprised. “I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it was a Christmas, back when I was, oh, maybe fourteen. Sometime around then. My dad insisted we couldn’t leave it until after the holidays, and I remember thinking it was a shitty way to spend the time. I still had goop in my hair when we sat down to Christmas dinner.”

“That doesn’t sound pleasant,” Castiel says.

“Not so much,” Mary says. “It was a werewolf, out on an old farm. And, god, but it was freezing. Freezing and wet and horrible, and I just wanted to be home in the warm, and to be thinking about the things my friends thought about, instead of worrying whether I’d have my throat torn out or my heart eaten. Anyway, I’m not saying I decided right then, because it still didn’t really seem possible to leave the life, but I think, possibly, that’s one of the times that really started me thinking. It can take more than one moment, though.”

“Yeah,” Castiel says, because of that he is increasingly sure. “Yeah, it can. I’m glad, for what it’s worth.”

“Glad?”

Mary lifts her head from his shoulder and looks at him. He isn’t sure she knows he can see her, but Mary tends to be more open with her expressions even when she knows she’s being watched. On Dean, Castiel normally sees greater emotion when Dean doesn’t realize Castiel is looking. She looks very like her oldest son just now.

“Yes, Mary. Glad that you found a way to at least leave the life a little, if that’s what you wanted. And glad you had Dean and Sam. And glad to have got to know you. I…I felt you should know.”

“Well,” she says, smiling and patting his arm, “I’m glad you Fell, then, so I could get to know you.”

And she doesn’t say anything else about that Christmas hunt, but she does stand with him and keep watching the lights, and Castiel thinks the look in her eyes is an echo of how he’s feeling.

***

The forest was quiet after the cleansing. Castiel hovered through the space, taking satisfaction in the mission being completed, as the other angels left. Anna was still out here, walking between the dwellings of those she’d destroyed, surveying her work. Until Anna left, Castiel would stay.

Pristine white stretched around him. Hardly any of the villagers had made it this far. Back in the clearing, the ground was churned and reddened, but here it was mostly still white and unbroken. Perfect. Like the Host.

A splash of red pulled his attention, and Castiel turned several of his galaxy-eyes to it, taking in the shape and texture and shade. Not enough blood for an adult. A child, then, which had run further and faster than most. But no-one could run from Heaven completely. Sooner or later, God’s justice caught up with them all.

Something darted through him, disturbing the currents of his self, and Castiel shuddered. A child, cut down, seemed...less than perfect.

“The child was not even close to being grown,” Anna said from behind him. “And now she won’t grow to adulthood at all.”

Castiel didn’t startle, because he was beyond that, but he did acknowledge to himself that he hadn’t sensed Anna approach. A tactical failing, and one he would address. There was nothing about blood on snow that should take his attention so completely from his duties, and he would ensure nothing like it happened again.

“One child matters little,” he said, and ignored the ripples in himself at those words. They weren’t in service of God’s word and so mattered not at all. “Are you ready to leave?”

“Yes,” Anna said, and closed her human eyes. Her angelic ones regarded Castiel, and as usual it would be unsettling, if Castiel had it in him to be unsettled by such things. “I am ready to leave this place.”

She moved, pushing out through the vessel, rays of light bursting through flesh, and subsumed the woman inside her true form. The body fell to the ground and the soul sat within Anna, ready to be lifted to Heaven as befitted that of a human which had given itself over to the greater purpose of the Host.

Anna’s eyes stayed on Castiel, and he gave most of his over to surveying the area one more time. Sometimes, Lucifer’s forces made an attempt on the Host when it arrived on Earth in small numbers. Vigilance was ever important.

At her signal, he released the connection to this part of the world and reached for the other realm that was his own, the one where the need to be separate ceased and his father’s light welcomed them all home. If Anna was a little quiet, he didn’t think to mention it. She was sometimes that way after a mission, reviewing and assessing. And if Castiel felt an echo of that sensation he experienced when looking down at the blood on the snow, that was even easier to ignore.

He was of the Host, which meant perfection, and so he couldn’t have felt any regret at all.

***

They sit around the tree and drink, Dean and Sam falling into teasing each other about childhood stories as Mary listens with affection and a shadow of pain on her face. Castiel watches, smiling a little when Dean throws his head back and laughs, or when Sam grins the way that means he’s letting himself stop analyzing everything so much, just for a while.

Mary tells her own stories, of friends long gone and of her own parents. She speaks about her first hunt, about the first time she went after a ghost on her own, and about the time she noticed Dean’s kindergarten was haunted. Each story fills in a little of the blank spaces about her, and Castiel takes note of the way Dean and Sam receive each one as a gift.

Eventually, Mary turns to Castiel and raises an eyebrow.

“How about you, Castiel?” she asks. “If you have any stories, would you like to share them?”

“Yeah, Cas,” Dean says. “Don’t hold out on us. You gotta have some good stuff in that giant brain of yours.”

There’s a light, an affection, in Dean’s eyes that Castiel hopes he might get to think more about later. They’ve been dancing round each other for long enough. But now isn’t the time for that. Now is the time for reflection and for sharing past parts of himself as a way to settle in to his new present.

He could tell them about Balthasar, he supposes, about the times the other Seraph skirted dangerously close to breaking his orders, or he could speak of some of the things he himself saw, in cultures they won’t have heard of.

Instead, he thinks of red and snow and the crunch underfoot, and he holds his mug in both hands, and he lets himself remember. He lets himself remember the doubt, in Anna’s eyes and in his own self, and he sets it aside. And he shares other stories.

“Have I ever told you about the time Anna was instructed to have us watch over the whales?” he asks, because the winter festival might have been the start of his doubt, or of Anna’s, or both, but there are other emotions he thinks may have rippled through him in those distant days, joy among them. Now feels like a time for joy, the quiet sort. The sort that lasts. “Did I tell you about being assigned to keep an eye on a pod of Blue Whales?”

Dean’s eyes light up and Sam gets that interested look on his face. Mary shakes her head.

“Whales? Did you go swimming with them? That must have been strange. Those things are huge.”

Castiel feels the confines of his vessel, of his body, and finds it’s hard to remember what it felt like to be outside of it fully. He finds he can no longer remember what it felt like to be perfect. He understands he doesn’t care. Sometimes, change is good, even if it isn’t the ending that was expected.

“Not at the time,” he says. “In my true form, I’m much larger. If anything, I scared them.”

And he lets the himself sink into the past only as far as he can bring it into the present, and share it with these people who are now his family, as close to the Host as he will have again. 

He’ll take some time to think about the incident in the clearing again, but later. For now, he thinks less of blood on snow and more of his many limbs spreading through the deep ocean, as he brought his light into dark places and told the whales not to be afraid.

He sits with his family at Christmas time and he remembers.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think, if you liked anything especially. As all writers do, I love comments. They fuel me.


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